waste Tag

Problem plastics could be diverted from landfills and converted into fuel sources with new technology A plastics recycling innovation that does more with less, presented today at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago, simultaneously increases conversion to useful products while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. "The key discovery we report is the very low metal load," said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory chemist Janos Szanyi, who led the research team. "This makes the catalyst much cheaper." The new method more efficiently converts plastics to valuable commodity chemicals -- a process termed "upcycling." In addition, it produces much less methane, an undesirable greenhouse gas, as a byproduct, compared with other reported methods. "It was very interesting to us that there had been...